Forts & Energy Weapons

cthia wrote:Wait-a-minute!

::scratches head and arse::

Forts should have been carrying 2 - 3 times the missiles of an SD. SD(P) should have closed the gap, no? So, an SD(P) has damn near the missile loadout of a fort?

::scratches head/arse again::

cthia wrote:
Wait-a-minute!

::scratches head and arse::

Forts should have been carrying 2 - 3 times the missiles of an SD. SD(P) should have closed the gap, no? So, an SD(P) has damn near the missile loadout of a fort?

::scratches head/arse again::

cthia wrote:I give up. I've scoured the Web for pearls and caught no joy. I've scoured the Pearls for pearls and caught no joy. I've scoured posts for pearls and caught no joy. If Forts have energy weapons, there's hardly a peep about it.

runsforcelery wrote:In the Honorverse, the introduction of the MDM and the general Manticoran-spawned revolution in war-fighting technologies made pre-Havenite Wars fortress design obsolete, which has required some rethinking about fortress design. (The Solarian League hasn't gotten around to that yet, for some strange reason.) Also, in the course of the Havenite Wars, Manticore was sufficiently strapped for manpower and warships that it chose to stand down the majority of the Junction forts once Trevor's Star had been taken away from the Peeps. That represented four special considerations on the Admiralty's part. First, the crucial need for trained manpower and additional warships to maintain the offensive against such a numerically far larger foe. Second, that the immediate, critical threat of some sort of suicidal thrust through the Junction had been taken off the table by Trevor's star's conquest. Third, that the existing fortress designs had become obsolescent if not outright obsolete in the face of the new weapons systems about to be deployed. And, fourth (and in some ways the most critical consideration), that no one besides the People's Republic posed a significant threat to the Junction or the Home System at that time. In other words, the decision was made as part of a threat assessment of a very specific set of circumstances.

(3) Fortresses in the Honorverse have always been more manpower-efficient for their firepower than mobile units. That disparity has always existed; following Manticore's enthusiastic adoption of manpower-reducing technologies, it's become far, far more pronounced, however. The crew of one of the "new-model" fortresses which have been built to cover the Junction and the Lynx Terminus is about the same size as that of a Nike-class battle cruiser, exclusive of any LAC personnel assigned to them. That's not a very big manpower investment in a 15-16 megaton platform, I think, especially when the platform in question is so much bigger, tougher, and generally kick-the-hell-out-of-you nastier than any superdreadnought ever built. And especially when you consider that crew increases do not scale linearly if fortress size is increased above 16 megatons (see below).


[snip]
(6) In association with the idea of "drawing off" a defending fleet in order to pounce on a wormhole or a junction, please do bear in mind that an attacker doesn't have to come through the wormhole or the junction in question. This isn't the StarFire universe, and it's entirely possible to attack a wormhole or a junction in overwhelming force through a normal hyper-space attack. Thus while it's important for the defenders to be able to massacre anyone stupid enough to come through the wormhole right into the teeth of their fire, it's equally important for them to have "all-around" defensive capability. Manticoran fortresses are designed to shoot the hell out of "normal" attackers, not just deal with incursions through the wormholes they're defending. During the early period of the Havenite Wars, the Peeps' possession of Trevor's Star made the possibility of an assault through the Junction particularly critical, but that was never the sole consideration of the Star Kingdom's defensive planners, and it is at best a secondary (or even tertiary) consideration of the Star Empire's defensive strategists. Designing fortresses — especially current-technology fortresses — with an eye towards primarily defeating relatively close-range attacks or somehow getting into energy range — or even, God help us, LAC-range — of the attackers would be extraordinarily foolish.

It should be remembered both that fortresses are not truly immobile and that their hull forms are significantly different from those of hyper-capable warships. Because they aren't hyper-capable, they don't require Warshawski sails, which means they don't require the "double-ended spindle" design of a superdreadnought. If they choose to drop the impeller wedges which give them mobility, they have an enormously greater field of fire than any superdreadnought, protected by sidewall bubble generators (and a few additional neat tricks the Manties have developed in the last few years), even though those wedges remain available if needed for protection as well as movement. Among other things, this gives them vastly more effective direct-fire anti-missile capability. They have much more volume (and usable surface area) for defensive systems, and they can be — and are — built with multiple MDM missile cores and very heavily armored deployment hatches. They carry more than twice as much ammunition, have a heavier volume of fire, are better protected, have four or five times as many counter missile launchers and point defense clusters, and require much smaller crews than superdreadnoughts half their size. In addition, fortresses, because they are fixed defenses that don't have to transport all of their war fighting capabilities with them, can be readily built (or reconfigured) to support multiple Keyhole platforms, including Keyhole-Two platforms, further augmenting their defensive firepower and providing enormously capable Apollo offensive fire control for all of those oodles and oodles of internal missiles they carry around with them . . . not to mention the system defense pods normally deployed in company with them.

Traditionally, fortresses have been designed and built with an eye towards refits and upgrades to a much greater extent than would be possible with a conventional warship. The pre-Havenite Wars Manticoran fortresses were built to then-current technological standards, however. In an era of MDMs — and especially Apollo — it was literally impossible to refit them radically enough to retain them as survivable and effective platforms, which is why the RMN completely redesigned them and started building from scratch. The new fortresses are built in modular sections which are transported to the point at which they will be needed and assembled in place (and which can be disassembled and moved somewhere else if that seems appropriate). They've also incorporated all of the new armor technologies, and their energy batteries have been arranged with an eye towards completely removing any of the (multiple) weapon decks (and the armor protecting them) in order to plug in new, upgraded weapons (or to change them out for additional CM launchers and point defense clusters, if that seems appropriate). They have enormous stowage capacity for missile pods and counter missiles, and their modular construction was deliberately designed to allow additional modules to be assembled into single platforms of up to 30 megatons. For that matter, they could be built even bigger than that, except that the Navy hasn't yet gotten around to designing a spinal structure to go to tonnages above that level. And they are fitted with armored LAC bays to provide them with large numbers of LACs for employment in local security functions and use in the new Manticoran anti-missile doctrines being developed.

runsforcelery wrote:As of 1900 PD, which is when On Basilisk Station takes place, no one has used laser heads extensively in combat. Mines are still "contact nukes" or kinetic kill vehicles, and the warheads mounted on them are "boom or burn" nuclear warheads. (Please note that five years later, at Hancock Station, the mines do have laser heads.) Late 19th-century PD nuclear warheads were intended to burn sidewalls from an extended range (over 9,000 kilometers by that time) but needed to get much closer than that to kill ships. They would damage ships at greater ranges, but the damage would have been relatively minor. So, at the time the Junction forts were first emplaced (decades before On Basilisk Station), the mines and missile warheads available did not have the standoff range to rapidly overwhelm and kill warships in the middle of a transit lane. Ship-mounted (or fortress-mounted) energy weapons did have the range to engage into and out of a transit lane with rapid and decisive effect, so fortresses were the best way to stop ships from attacking through a terminus and shipboard energy weapons were the best way to kill a fortresses trying to stop invaders from coming through a terminus.

cthia wrote:Thanks. No need to dig past the whopping soil strata you've already uncovered.

Over 2000 posts! OMG, that sure is some cheat sheet! You and others like you ever thought about getting together and publishing RFCs posts for us mere Manty Middy mortals?!!! You can imagine my excitement before I realized you were referring to the year 2012. As Shannon is fond of saying, OOPS. LOL

Jonathan_S wrote:Yeah, that was the year, not the number of posts. I don't have a good idea how many posts are in my cheat sheet; but it wouldn't be 2000. It's running to 500 pages so probably somewhere around 3-600 post range?? (Not sure of the ratio of short to long posts)


(And I need to update my sheet some more - I took a bit of a break from the forums when all the UC spoilers started flying and haven't dug up all of RFC's interesting posts from those threads)

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Yeah, that was the year, not the number of posts. I don't have a good idea how many posts are in my cheat sheet; but it wouldn't be 2000. It's running to 500 pages so probably somewhere around 3-600 post range?? (Not sure of the ratio of short to long posts)


(And I need to update my sheet some more - I took a bit of a break from the forums when all the UC spoilers started flying and haven't dug up all of RFC's interesting posts from those threads)

It's too bad that this forum uses such terrible software. There were a lot of interesting posts that got lost in the various problems.

Dauntless wrote:Citha if it is semi current fort then there is no point putting the SL grasers in it, while they are of a similar quality to them, there is no point using non MAnty/grayson/andermani hardware in them and risking the inevitable software and hardware probs.

while it was done early in the first war when they needed as many SDs as possible to offset the peps numbers, there was a reason that Manties/Grayson abandoned their Captured capital ships as soon as they could when they had better in the form of flight 3/4 Gryphon class SDs. even when the White Haven admiralty was running around looking for any SD it could find after Thunderbolt they made zero effort to reactivate the old prizes.

the great thing about using the SL grasers as IDEW is that you give it power, either via beemed power or its own capacitor bank or fusion plant and general targeting info and then using the systems built into the mount it locks onto the target and fires. almost no GA hardware to work around/cause problems.